A Second Studio Of Ex-STALKER Devs Appears

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It seems that Survarium devs Vostock weren’t the only studio to rise from the ashes of STALKER developer GSC. There’s also Union Studio, whose LinkedIn page states that they are “developing cross-platform action shooter which will be available for PC, Mac, PlayStation, XBOX.” It also reveals that the CEO is Eugene Kim, one of the Stalker coders, while the design lead is Peter Dushynsky, who apparently worked at Metro devs 4A, as well as taking the lead for “Stalker Online” at GSC.

An interesting way to support small businesses over large (non-state) monopolies; have a corruption level so high that companies have to disperse and reform into smaller chunks in order to avoid being crushed by it.

Well, the implication from the RPS story about GSC being shelved was because it got big enough that it was being crippled by being milked for bribes. Unsure whether this is true, but what I read hinted heavily at it.

That might be the case if it weren’t for that fact that organised crime is so prevalent in places like Moscow that most every commercial venture has to employ a ‘roof’ organisation (see: protection racket) to shield it from harassment (other than that of your own ‘roof’ when you fail to pay, or they decide you should be paying more); and that only the particularly large and/or successful ventures would have sufficient capital to employ legitimate and professional security operators (usually ex-military / police, so even then you have to worry, given the state of those institutions).

***This is according to the research I was doing into this last year for uni; and admittedly some of the primary sources were from the early 2000s so potentially things could have improved…

For the record, if you believe the latest reports about corruption, employment in “roofing” has moved from organized crime to police and various special services that abuse their power like no tomorrow. That’s in Russia, though: i’m not sure how it is in Ukraine.

The reasons were unknown – no official confirmation about them from Grigorovich. We can only speculate about them – one version is that he got second thoughts about the project that could fail to be economically viable especially when the consoles versions were out of the equation, an another one is that he simply got bored of making games.

No kidding. I had to re-install Stalker: SOC to get over the disappointment that they canceled Stalker 2. As long as they use a similar setting I don’t really care if it’s a new Stalker or not, maybe they can come up with something else exciting…

Hopefully some good will come of this, the only positive comments on Suvarium I’mhearing are from the developers and PC Gamer of whom lets face it are stupidly obsessed with the concept of MMO/Multiplayer games over everything else.